‘Longer it goes, stronger we get’: Trump says China doing very poorly as a result of trade war

PTI, Aug 16, 2019, 11:29 AM IST

Washington: US President Donald Trump has said that China is doing very poorly as a result of the trade war and the “longer it goes on, the stronger we get”.

Asserting that the United States is “having a very good discussion” on a trade deal with China, Trump told reporters at the Morristown airport in New Jersey that he will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping “very soon”.

“I think the longer the trade war goes on, the weaker China gets and the stronger we get. We’re taking in massive amounts of money. Billions and billions of dollars. And I think the longer it goes, the stronger we get. I have a feeling it’s going to go fairly short,” he said on Thursday.

As a result of the trade war, China is doing very poorly, Trump said. “The tariffs have really bitten into China. They haven’t bitten into us at all except for the reporters that want to make it look that way, but they don’t understand what’s happening,” he said.

“We’ve taken close to USD 60 billion in tariff money. The consumer has not paid for them. Now, at some point, they may have to pay something. But they understand that,” Trump asserted. He claimed that millions of jobs have been lost and thousands of companies are shutting down in China.

“They’d love to have somebody like (former vice president Joe) Biden, who doesn’t know what he’s doing. I mean, I just put a clip where he said, ‘Oh, we want to build up China’. Well, they gave us a very strong China which has taken out over USD 500 billion a year for many years from our country. And that’s not going to happen anymore,” he said. Trump, however, said that the US is having a very good discussion on a trade deal with China.

“We’re having very good discussions with China. They very much want to make a deal. We’ll see what happens. We had a deal and they decided not to make it. Now, I think they would like to have that opportunity again,” the US president said. “We have a call scheduled soon. We’ll be speaking with him (Xi Jinping) very soon,” he said.

To a question on the protests in Hong Kong, Trump said, “I really believe he (Chinese President Xi Jinping) can work it out. I know him well. If he wants to he can work that out in a very humane fashion. He can work out something so that everybody is happy.”